In countries like Australia, where we have plenty of empty space, finding places to put wind turbines and solar panels isn't a huge deal. But for all the nations out there with way more population density, working out how to generate renewable...

The 1991 law presumes veterans were exposed to the defoliant if they have certain diseases and “set foot” in Vietnam, but Navy vets and Air Force vets in Thailand say they were also exposed. Here’s our guide to groups seeking Agent Orange benefits.

Perhaps the greatest polo player ever, Adolfo Cambiaso is planning to compete on a pony that died nearly a decade ago—a clone of his beloved stallion Aiken Cura. With more than 25 replicas of champion horses now in existence, Haley Cohen explores how the science came to polo.

Janet Devlin's insight:

man's continuing attempt to establish dominion over nature: the commoditisation of life

How the copepods can switch from being multicolored to disappearing completely.

Some of the most spectacular colors produced by organisms are derived from periodic layered structures on the length scale of the wavelengths of visible light. Such photonic structures consist of regularly alternating layers of two transparent materials with different refractive indices, such that light reflected from the different layers undergoes constructive interference for some wavelengths and destructive interference for others.

A multilayer stack can act as a spectrally selective reflector when the optical thickness nd (the product of the physical thickness d and the refractive index n) of the layers falls within the wavelength range of visible light, resulting in the observation of distinct colors. The most efficient reflector arrangement is the quarter-wave stack, where the optical thickness of both layers is equal to the one-fourth of the wavelength of the reflected light.

One of the most striking examples of such photonic structures are the male sapphirinid copepods, small marine crustaceans that produce a variety of different colors, but only when the incident light is at specific angles to the animal’s dorsal surface. Thus, the copepods “flash” light of a specific color, but as they move they become transparent and suddenly seem to almost completely disappear (a movie showing this behavior is available at http://www.liquidguru.com/octopod-copepod/). The goal of this study is to understand the structural basis for both the variability of the colors and the strong angular dependence of the reflected light.

Members of the copepod family Sapphirinidae are found between the ocean surface and a depth of 300 m. Their reflectivity and color are thought to play a role in interspecies communication and mate recognition in the open ocean. The iridescent colors of the males of each species are closely related to their distribution in the epipelagic zone and are thought to provide increased visibility against the ambient background. Species with warm colors (i.e., with longer wavelengths) are usually found in shallow waters, whereas species with blue colors are usually found in deeper waters, where the spectrum of the filtered solar light is primarily in the blue-green range.

Even within the Sapphirinidae family, the Sapphirina metallinamales, the main focus of this study, are exceptional in the variety and brilliance of their colors. The multilayer reflectors responsible for the colors in S. metallina are composed of stacks of anhydrous guanine crystals separated by cytoplasm, similar to those found in iridescent fish scales, silver spiders, and chameleons. In contrast to the crystals found in chameleons, the guanine crystals in the sapphirinids, as well as those in fish and spiders, are thin plates. The exceptionally high refractive index along the axis normal to the biogenic plate crystals provides high index contrast relative to the cytoplasm. Unlike the guanine crystals in fish and spiders, the sapphirinid crystals are perfectly regular hexagons in an extremely ordered arrangement (1). Earlier studies reported that the measured thickness of the crystals did not match the expected reflectance (or reflectivity) calculated assuming an ideal multilayer system. Furthermore, no connection was found between the thickness of the crystals and the copepod colors.

When it comes to hands, it's chimps, and not humans, that have done the evolving, according to new research indicating that, despite learning to make stone tools, our hands have stayed pretty much the same. US and Spanish researchers measured t

A child’s death from scarlet fever wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows during the devastating epidemics that swept Europe and North America in the 1800s. But Samuel Gee, a highly regarded doctor in England, found something very strange while cutting open the corpse of a seven-year-old boy in London in 1870. Gee’s post-mortem examination findings, preserved in a single paragraph written in 1871, recorded signs of damage called aneurysms in the coronary arteries running across the surface of the boy

The CSIRO, Australia’s peak science body, might have stumbled across the most sought of cures in human history - the hangover remedy. The scientists have been researching pears with Horticulture Innovation Australia to discover the hidden benefits...

Is there any way to put this delicately? Men, when they have children, get fatter. We’ve known this for a while, and now the first nationally representative sample confirms it. In a study published in the American Journal of Men’s Health, researchers at Northwestern tracked the body mass index of...

From the woman named Crystal METHany who got arrested for shooting a missile into a vehicle to the man arrested for drugs with the real surname of Cocaine, check out 10 ironically named criminals and crimes.

Researchers make important step towards a solar cell that generates hydrogen.

Researchers have developed a very promising prototype of a new solar celll. The material gallium phosphide enables their solar cell to produce the clean fuel hydrogen gas from liquid water. Processing the gallium phosphide in the form of very small nanowires is novel and helps to boost the yield by a factor of ten. And does so using ten thousand times less precious material.

According to Bakkers, it's not simply about the yield -- where there is still a lot of scope for improvement he points out: "For the nanowires we needed ten thousand less precious GaP material than in cells with a flat surface. That makes these kinds of cells potentially a great deal cheaper," Bakkers says. "In addition, GaP is also able to extract oxygen from the water -- so you then actually have a fuel cell in which you can temporarily store your solar energy. In short, for a solar fuels future we cannot ignore gallium phosphide any longer."

GaP has good electrical properties but the drawback that it cannot easily absorb light when it is a large flat surface as used in GaP solar cells. The researchers have overcome this problem by making a grid of very small GaP nanowires, measuring five hundred nanometers (a millionth of a millimeter) long and ninety nanometers thick. This immediately boosted the yield of hydrogen by a factor of ten to 2.9 percent. A record for GaP cells, even though this is still some way off the fifteen percent achieved by silicon cells coupled to a battery.

The Runit Dome in the Marshall Islands is a hulking legacy of years of US nuclear testing. Now locals and scientists are warning that rising sea levels caused by climate change could cause 111,000 cubic yards of debris to spill into the ocean

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